Since the start of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza in October 2023, Forensic Architecture (FA) has been collecting data related to attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure by the Israeli military, revealing the near-total destruction of civilian life in Gaza. FA has also collected and analyzed evacuation orders issued by the Israeli military, directing Palestinian civilians to areas of Gaza designated as ‘safe’. These orders have resulted in the repeated, large-scale displacement of the Palestinian population across Gaza, often to areas which, despite this designation, have subsequently come under attack. 

Mass displacement and attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure converge in the observed targeting of medical practitioners and infrastructure (often doubling as shelters), an ongoing focal point within FA’s work on Gaza, best represented in their investigation into the al-Ahli Hospital blast, When it stopped being a war: The Situated Testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah. The project speaks to the multiscalar approach necessary to understand and analyze the relation between incidents and patterns in Gaza, so that testimonies from the ground may be not only elevated but further situated and corroborated within an investigative framework. 

FA’s development of a database and interactive platform, composed of many thousands of datapoints, offers a vehicle for understanding the relationship between individual incidents like the al-Ahli hospital blast and wider Israeli strategies for dismantling the fundamental conditions of life in Gaza. Israel's false criminalization of medical staff and their sites of operation has made both seeking and providing medical care in Gaza a liability, and set the stage for the subsequent targeting of all categories of infrastructure, from the urban to the agricultural. 

To identify patterns such as this in Israel’s conduct, FA's interactive web platform turns thousands of datapoints into a navigable ‘map’ of Gaza, within which it is possible to define regions, periods in time, and categories of events. Users can filter the data, revealing trends within datasets and relationships between different datasets (for instance, between the military ground invasion and the destruction of medical infrastructure). The patterns observed broadly indicate a systematic and organized campaign to destroy life, conditions necessary for life, and life-sustaining infrastructure. Forensic Architecture’s monitoring and research consists of an interactive cartographic platform and an 827-page text report, which deploy spatial and pattern analysis to observe the ways in which Israel’s military operations entailed widespread civilian harm. The platform is an iterative, live interface that FA continually updates and maintains, while the report was provided to the South African legal team to support their ongoing submissions in the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

Forensic Architecture Team
Eyal Weizman, Nour Abuzaid, Omar Ferwati, Davide Piscitelli, Samaneh Moafi, Joshua Richards, Peter Polack, Júlia Nueno Guitart, Lucia Rebolino, Andra Pop-Jurj, Shourideh C. Molavi, Natalia Sliwinska, Elliot Bourne, Nour Abuzaid, Peter Polack, Júlia Nueno Guitart, Robert Trafford, Robert Mackey, Elizabeth Breiner, Ray Adams Row Farr, Amina Darwish, Isabella Parlamis, Madeleine Griffiths, Agata Nguyen Chuong, Lola Conte, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Nicholas Masterton, Jumanah Bawazir, Thomas Mattia, Martin Eichler, Angela Mehta

Supporting Organizations 
Al-Haq, Airwars  
  
Extended Team
Information design and consultancy: Sophie Dyer  
Platform design and development: Rectangle  
Platform development: Nathan Wright  
Legal research: Leela Jadhav  
Research assistants: Thomas Burke, Samuel Storey, Thomas Lye, Sofia Rudi Kent, Joel Schülin, Pinelopi Gardika, Daniel Day, Antonio Voce  
Graphic design & layout: Giorgia Chiarion  
Special thanks to: Firas Hawasly, Harj Narulla, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor  

Forensic Architecture (FA) (GB) is a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, that investigates human rights violations committed by states, police forces, militaries, and corporations. FA works in partnership with institutions across civil society—grassroots activists, legal teams, international NGOs, and media organisations—to carry out investigations with and on behalf of communities and individuals affected by conflict, police brutality, border regimes, and environmental violence. 
 
The interdisciplinary group uses architecture as an optical device to investigate contested incidents, cross-referencing a range of evidentiary sources and methodologies including open-source research, situated witness interviews, remote sensing, digital modelling, and spatial analysis. FA is also credited with the creation of an eponymous new field and form of interdisciplinary investigative practice, and have supported the growth of agencies worldwide that utilize and advance their methods. 

FA has undertaken over 100 investigations worldwide, findings from which have been presented across international media, in exhibitions at leading cultural institutions, and in parliamentary inquiries, citizen’s tribunals, and national and international courtrooms, including the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights, and the United Nations General Assembly.

The Golden Nica is awarded to A Cartography of Genocide: Israel’s Conduct in Gaza Since October 2023 by Forensic Architecture in recognition of a work whose significance extends far beyond the boundaries of interactive art, while remaining deeply rooted in the critical capacities of artistic practice. The interface has become the dominant form through which people encounter the world and this project retools the interface as a space of public investigation.
For over a decade, Forensic Architecture, led by Israeli born architect Eyal Weizman, has pioneered new methodologies at the intersection of architecture, technology, journalism, human rights research, and visual culture. In this project, the collective brings together vast quantities of spatial, temporal, and evidentiary data to construct an interactive cartography of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Through satellite imagery, geospatial analysis, open-source intelligence, witness testimony, and forensic reconstruction, the platform enables users to navigate and interrogate patterns of destruction across territory, infrastructure, and civilian life.
The jury recognized this work for its interface design, information architecture, methodological rigor, and the organization of public knowledge. By transforming thousands of dispersed data points into a publicly accessible and navigable interface, the project demonstrates how interactive media can render complex realities legible without reducing their complexity. In doing so, the work transforms the interface into a civic infrastructure. Through acts of navigation, comparison, and investigation, users become participants in the construction of public knowledge. 
The significance of this work lies not only in the urgency of its subject matter, but in the way it transforms evidence into an interactive public resource. It shows how artists, architects, researchers, and designers can deploy advanced technologies in the service of public knowledge, historical documentation, and civic accountability at a moment when technological systems are frequently mobilized for surveillance, extraction, militarization, and disinformation, A Cartography of Genocide offers a radically different model for technological practice: grounded in transparency and accessibility.
This work is especially vital in an era when artistic, cultural, and academic spaces are increasingly subject to censorship and pressures that constrain what can be shown, discussed, or investigated. Projects that rigorously collect, organize, and make evidence accessible help sustain the conditions for public inquiry, critical reflection, and democratic debate.
The jury believes this work represents one of the most significant contemporary examples of how interactive and computational media can intervene meaningfully in urgent political and humanitarian realities. It is an extraordinary achievement whose implications will resonate far beyond the present moment.

The Coordinates of Our Present – Welcome to the World of Irresolvable Conflicts

Statement by Gerfried Stocker

Under the title “Negotiating Humanity,” this year’s festival dedicates itself to a present in which much of what we have long taken for granted is being shaken, and fundamental coordinates of our world are in motion and being renegotiated. Not individual crises stand at the center, but the irreversible shift of those reference systems within which we understand politics, technology, society, and humanity itself.

The geopolitical and hegemonic conflicts that open up along these transformations are escalating and hardening. The effects of climate change that have manifested so far increasingly prove to be harbingers of impacts that reach far beyond the primary physical consequences of global warming. And not least, the development of artificial intelligence has raised questions that touch on the foundations of our self-understanding and challenge our understanding of what it means to be human, the Conditio Humana.

The results of this year’s Prix Ars Electronica reinforce us in this thematic framing. Once again, the Prix Ars Electronica proves itself a seismograph of social and cultural shifts in our present, making visible how clearly a changed understanding of artistic practice has established itself: to view artistic work not only as reflection and statement, but as active intervention, as a field in which the capacity for social impact of art becomes increasingly more important than formal, aesthetic, or individual positions.

In all three main categories of the Prix Ars Electronica as well as in the STARTS Prize of the European Commission, which is announced jointly with the Prix, the international expert juries have ranked projects at the top that uncompromisingly confront the great conflicts and upheavals of our time, and in doing so place our self-understanding of our role as human beings and as humanity up for debate. In highly different forms, with different artistic means, methods, and messages, the awarded projects engage with that field of tension that Ars Electronica has carried in its title since its founding in 1979: Art – Technology – Society.

That this role does not remain an abstract programmatic positioning shows itself this year with particular clarity. For a jury of five international experts has decided, in an extensive and substantive process, to award the Golden Nica of the Prix Ars Electronica 2026 in the category Interactive Art + to the project “A Cartography of Genocide” by Forensic Architecture.

We are aware that the presentation of a project that carries the word “genocide” explicitly in its title triggers deep and opposing reactions in many people: outrage over the massive suffering of the civilian population in Gaza, as well as pain and objection among those who see in this choice of terminology a relativization of the historical singularity of the Holocaust.

We respect the jury’s decision. At the same time, we consider it necessary — precisely from an Austrian perspective — not to leave this decision unchallenged, and to discuss openly the historical, political, and social implications of this decision — not in order to take sides or render a judgment, but in the awareness of our institutional responsibility to give space to openness, diversity, and controversy, to name dissent and not to conceal it.

This also includes the unambiguous and resolute rejection of antisemitism, racism, and every form of disregard for human dignity.

Precisely in times of fundamental upheaval, we see it all the more as the responsibility of a festival for art, technology, and society to keep spaces for dialogue open even under conditions of deep polarization, to strengthen the capacity for conflict and democratic debate, and thus to counter the logic of mutual escalation.